The SLA had announced itself to the world on Nov. 6, 1973, in a terrible deed that has gone all but unmentioned in the current reportage on Soliah's case. Without warning, three of its "soldiers" ambushed and gunned down the first African-American superintendent of schools in Oakland. Dr. Marcus Foster had no warning when he was met with a hail of bullets in a parking lot behind the Oakland School District office. The bullets had been tipped with cyanide, just so he would have no chance to survive the attack.

His crime, according to the SLA's official death warrant, was that he followed a School Board directive to issue I.D. cards to students, to protect them from drug dealers and gang members wandering onto their campuses intending to do them harm.

The Foster killing revolted me, as it did many, but not all, members of the radical community. Thus Ramparts received many letters like the one by yippee leader Stew Albert, accusing us of "giving a green light" to the police to hunt down and "murder" the SLA warriors.

Leonard Weinglass, the famed lawyer for Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman and the Chicago Seven and now counsel for Black Panther and cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal, then represented the families of the dead SLA members who sought monetary restitution from the city of Los Angeles for denying justice to their offspring.

In my view, however, justice had been done. If anything, the SLA killers hadn't been punished enough.

In fairness to Soliah, it is not clear that she was aware of the SLA's intentions before the murder of Marcus Foster, although she certainly embraced them afterwards. According to Patty Hearst, who was kidnapped by the SLA and then converted to their political agenda, Soliah participated in a 1975 bank robbery the SLA committed in a Sacramento suburb.

An innocent bystander, Myrna Lee Opshal, who was pregnant and had come to the bank to deposit church funds, was accidentally shot and killed by SLA member Emily Harris. Later Harris dismissed the killing to her comrades saying the victim was "a pig," explaining, "She was married to a doctor." (Ironically, Soliah today is herself married to a doctor.)

These were the deeds, and this was the mentality of the gang to which Kathleen Soliah dedicated her radical political life. Now she is once again being defended by progressives, who blame the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon even for the evils they themselves have committed.

If Kathleen Soliah's crimes are excused by Nixon, why would not Nixon's be excused by the crimes his Communist enemies committed? Soliah's attorney, Stuart Hanlon, is a graduate of the William Kunstler-Leonard Weinglass school of radical alibis. He recently helped win the release from prison of convicted murderer and former Black Panther Geronimo Pratt by claiming the FBI and police had conspired to frame Pratt because of his passion for "social justice."

The radical fantasy that turned the Soliahs into paranoid conspirators is very much alive today in the rhetoric of the left, which is unrelenting in its insane picture of America as a repressive, racist, sexist, imperialist empire. It is kept alive in part by the radical rewriting of the history of the '60s in which "noble idealists" like Soliah declared war on government "fascists" and were, whatever they did, always the hapless victims of the greater evil of their adversaries.

There is a whole library of memoirs and histories by aging New Leftists and "progressive" academics dealing with the rebellions of the 1960s, but hardly a page in any of them has the basic decency or honesty to say, "Yes, we supported these murderers and those spies and the agents of an evil empire."

I'd like to hear even one of these advocates of "justice" acknowledge that "we greatly exaggerated the evils of this system and underestimated its decencies and virtues and we're sorry." I'd like to hear that from Soliah and her apologists. I'd like to hear them pay a moment's tribute to Marcus Foster and to Myrna Opshal, and to the brave policemen and FBI agents who risked their lives to protect other Americans, including progressives, from the harm they intended.

I'd like to hear them say, just once, "I'm sorry."

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